In-Home Certified Academic Language Therapist

Thrive Education Partners is building a roster of Certified Academic Language Therapists to work with families in the Nashville area. Placements are in-home, on a consistent weekly schedule, with frequency and length set to support genuine therapeutic progress rather than periodic homework help. We are hiring ahead of demand, so we are interested in speaking with qualified CALTs now and matching them to families as placements open.

Academic language therapy is not tutoring with a phonics component, and the distinction matters in how we fill these roles. The work follows a controlled, cumulative scope and sequence; it moves at the pace the student's mastery allows rather than the pace of a school calendar; and it holds to multisensory practice, discovery teaching, and daily data on what has actually become automatic.

A student who has spent years compensating needs an instructor who can tell the difference between a word read and a word decoded, and who is willing to stay on a concept until it is secure even when the student can approximate the right answer without it.

The right candidate holds current CALT certification, has completed a supervised practicum, and brings the patience that a two-year therapy arc requires. Just as importantly, this person can explain the work to a parent in language that builds confidence rather than anxiety, because families living with dyslexia have often been told a great deal that turned out not to be true.

• Deliver in-home academic language therapy sessions on a consistent weekly schedule.
• Administer or review initial assessment data to establish each student's starting point in the scope and sequence.
• Plan and teach lessons that move through alphabet and reading deck work, new concept discovery, controlled decodable reading, spelling, handwriting, and verbal and written expression.
• Use discovery teaching so the student derives each new pattern from the data rather than receiving it as a rule to memorize.
• Track mastery daily and adjust pacing based on accuracy and automaticity, not on lessons completed.
• Build fluency and comprehension work into the sequence as decoding becomes reliable.
• Explicitly teach syllable division, morphology, and orthographic patterns as the sequence introduces them.
• Support transfer to school work, including reading assignments and written output, without letting homework displace the therapy sequence.
• Maintain lesson records and progress data that document growth over time.
• Communicate regularly with families about progress, next steps, and what to reinforce at home.
• Coordinate with school staff, evaluators, or outside providers when a family requests it.
• Partner with Thrive's Educational Management team on progress monitoring and any adjustments to the plan.

At Thrive, effective literacy intervention means more than repeated exposure to phonics or extra reading practice. A student who has struggled to read has usually built an elaborate set of workarounds — context guessing, memorized shapes, careful avoidance — and those workarounds hold up until the text gets hard enough. Real progress comes from replacing them, which requires structured, sequential, cumulative instruction delivered with enough consistency that the new skill becomes the automatic one.

That means we hire therapists rather than tutors for this work. We expect the person in this role to own the scope and sequence, to make instructional decisions from their own data, and to hold the line on pacing when a family or a school would rather see faster movement. In return, we handle the family relationship, the scheduling, and the administrative weight, so the session time stays instructional.

Is this the right fit?

This role is a poor use of your time if your background is general reading tutoring, classroom literacy instruction, or an introductory Orton-Gillingham awareness course without a supervised practicum. Those are valuable qualifications, and we place people who hold them in other roles, but these placements call for someone who has completed the full therapy training and has run the sequence with real students under supervision.

If you are mid-practicum and pursuing certification, we would still like to hear from you — say where you are in the process when you apply.

• Licensed Dyslexia Therapist credential in addition to CALT.
• Master's degree in education, special education, speech-language pathology, or a related field.
• Experience administering and…